PM rejects Lord Wolfson’s call for relaxed immigration stance

Boris Johnson has rejected Lord Wolfson’s call earlier this week to allow businesses to hire the staff they need to plug workforce gaps in return for paying a visa tax of around 7%.

In an article for the Evening Standard on Monday, Wolfson, who is a prominent Brexiteer in the retail sector, said: “Whitehall must be under no illusion: labour shortages are a real problem.

“The dearth of HGV drivers is just a very visible example of a chronic problem affecting thousands of restaurants, care homes, small businesses, hospitals, fruit farms, warehouses and more.”

Lord Wolfson also said at Next’s financial results last week that Brexit should allow Britain to bring more flexibility into its immigration policy, but said the current system is “not geared up” to respond to demand as needed.

The prime minister has said this strategy is “not the way forward”.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Johnson said: “I have read what Lord Wolfson has said and … that approach has extreme limitations, to put it mildly. What Lord Wolfson is saying is he doesn’t want any kind of control or restraint on the number of people he can access from abroad to run his business.

“I don’t think that is the way forward. What you saw in the last 20 years or more, almost 25 years, has been an approach where business of many kinds was able to mainline low wage, low-cost immigration for a very long time.

“In some ways that worked well … the people who came did a wonderful job, but what that resulted in was the suppression of pay but also conditions.”

Lord Wolfson’s plea follows the British Retail Consortium, which said last week that the government issue of 5,000 short-term visas to address the HGV driver shortage in the run-up to Christmas “will do little” to tackle the scale of the crisis in the retail sector.

Johnson told Today that so far, just 127 applications for the scheme have been received.